In September, trans model and activist Munroe Bergdorf was “literally having a breakdown”. At what she considers the lowest point of her life, she had been sacked by L’Oréal and become a tabloid sensation, prompting a ceaseless tide of violent abuse. She was certain her career was over.
Eight months on, Bergdorf is sunny and buoyant, prepping for her appearance on Channel 4’s Genderquake: The debate. She has worked as a newspaper columnist, TV panellist and been judged Disruptor of the Year by Cosmopolitan magazine. She made her catwalk debut at New York fashion week in February, has just signed a deal to present her own chat show – which she “can’t talk about yet” – and makes a living through branding deals including Ray-Ban and Missguided. “It has been a fine-tuning experience but I now have a manager, agent and a publicist. The sheer amount of stuff that comes in now is nuts.”
Bergdorf is unrecognisable as her former self. Emotionally, she says she can still feel untethered, but physically the difference is significant. Facial feminisation surgery has seen her face transformed in a Belgian clinic while hormonal bone across her brow and jaw (which develops for boys in puberty) was sawn down and smoothed out. The procedure is radical and gruesome and was filmed in February for a Channel 4 documentary, What Makes a Woman. In it, Bergdorf is sedated to calm her nerves but is shown frightened, quietly crying on the operating table before the anaesthetic takes hold.
“This is something I wanted for seven years,” she explains, sipping on pineapple juice in a south London canteen. “I didn’t just decide willy nilly to become pretty – that’s a bonus – I wanted to feel more harmonious with my own body.” Bergdorf, 31, who has identified as a trans woman since she was 24, explains how she suffered intense gender dysphoria. “It’s not that I felt ugly … it was about feeling the gender I identify with. And I didn’t.”
The documentary was a way to help fund the cost – between £6,000 and £12,000 – but, she mostly hopes, it will make for better public understanding. “This is just my transition,” she emphasises, “and one example of a trans person’s life, but if I can help educate people to show what we actually go through – it may help to humanise the situation.”
Bergdorf’s surgeon, Dr Bart van de Ven, a renowned specialist, is shown in the documentary presenting her with virtual mock-ups of what he hopes she might look like afterwards. The end result was markedly different. Was she worried she might not like her new face?
“People will say, ‘Oh, you just wanted plastic surgery’, but it’s not like that. I didn’t go in saying I wanted to look like Nicki Minaj, I went in telling him, ‘I want to look like the best me’, and I trusted him to do his magic.” Despite the pain and recovery time – months later, Bergdorf is still sore from the incisions – she says the difference to her wellbeing is well worth it. “I can be present in the moment. I’m not thinking about my reflection in the mirror or worrying about whether I have shine on my forehead which then accentuates my [masculine features] – it’s stuff you wouldn’t understand unless you’re trans.”
Bergdorf acknowledges that by having the surgery she is “conforming to typical ideas of what it looks like to be female or to be feminine” but explains that “it’s like looking at myself for the first time. And nobody is above socialisation and the norms of what [women] are expected to look like”.
In any case, she says, she’s constantly learning. “As a society, we’re really hard on people who don’t get things right straight away. I don’t get things right straight away. I look back at my early 20s and think: ‘How are you not dead?’ or ‘How did people put up with you?’ I was a little terror and I was quite disrespectful of people.”
In February, Bergdorf was asked to join an advisory LGBTQ panel by Dawn Butler, Labour’s women and equalities minister. “It was unpaid, once a month for a couple of hours, to be a sounding board. I wasn’t writing policy, I was there to speak about my experience as a trans woman of colour.” Within a week, Bergdorf stepped down after the Times and Daily Mail published a series of her provocative old tweets about gay-bashing, “butch lesbians” and her argument that the suffragettes were white supremacists.
“I’ve learnt so much in the past eight years, you don’t think when you’re younger. As you get older, you gain experience and realise everyone is fighting a battle. But I found [that] situation hilarious – not the tweets, I thought the tweets themselves were really stupid, but I was 23.”
At the time, Bergdorf hadn’t transitioned and was identifying as a gay man – “I was making fun of myself as an effeminate gay man” – which she felt was deliberately ignored in the coverage. “What makes me laugh is that I’m usually having to debate the validity of my gender with the Times and the Daily Mail. They need to decide which I am: a gay man masquerading as a woman or a homophobic woman.”
Did the Labour party ask her to resign over the tweets? “No, they wanted me to stay but I couldn’t help in any way. The conservative press just wanted to use me as a pawn to attack Jeremy Corbyn. The coverage was ruining my career, it was ruining my mental health. The Daily Mail printed pictures of me at Halloween saying I practised voodoo. It was a literal witch hunt.”
How does she deal with the scrutiny? “I know it’s not about me, it’s about their bigotry. It’s something deeper than me.” Nevertheless Bergdorf remains a totem in the gender culture wars. “I try not to think about it.” She physically slumps. “It stresses me out. It’s about what I represent. If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else. I don’t need their validation – they’re never going to like me.”
Bergdorf frequently runs into trouble for her views on race, sexuality, mental health and gender but she tries to not let it bother her. “If people think I’m too controversial or doing it for effect, they can think that. I know I’m vocal and honest and speaking truth that people haven’t felt comfortable to say or have heard before.
“People don’t talk about these things, so they remain controversial and nothing changes. Anyone who says that just likes things the way that they are. If you are a cisgender, middle-aged white woman who has never experienced what I’ve experienced, then maybe you think I just say things for the hell of it. But if you’ve lived what I’ve lived, you would see that what I’m talking about is necessary.
“White women feel threatened because they’re no longer being seen as the default.”
The importance of speaking from experience forms a crucial part of Bergdorf’s activism. Does she understand then, the ire provoked at the women’s march in January when she called for the women’s rights debate “not to be centred around women with vaginas”?
“I said ‘let’s not centre’, I didn’t say ‘let’s not talk about’. By centring, I mean let’s not place that as the sole important thing that we’re identifying as womanhood. [This is one of] the reasons why trans women are being othered, ostracised and murdered, because we’re not being seen in the same way or of the same value.”
Bergdorf is cautious about who is in her life now and keeps her circle of friends and family tight. In the past week she has been shouted at on her doorstep, heckled on live TV and has filed a complaint against a driver for verbally abusing her.
“Trans people are just trying to exist in a society that won’t let us be part of it,” she shrugs. “Me acknowledging and celebrating blackness, identifying racism and speaking about my experience as a trans woman of colour isn’t racist or exclusionary. It shouldn’t be threatening. The fact that people feel that proves that they only want to be inclusive when they’re on top.”
Her optimism emerges as we get up to leave. “I want to live in a community that includes everyone, people of mixed abilities and backgrounds – that has always been the goal. I just want to find a way where we can all exist together as a society.” She laughs. “Just don’t make me sound controversial!”
What Makes a Woman is on Wednesday, 10pm, Channel 4
